The present invention relates to telephone-based data collection systems, and, more particularly, is directed to a voice recognition system using a script including prompts and corresponding recognition grammars which are empirically refined.
Many industries collect data from respondents by telephone. For qualitative information, a human agent is conventionally preferred. However, for certain applications, such as medical patient monitoring, dependence on human interviewers prohibitively increases the cost of gathering data as often as desired. For quantitative information, an automated data collection system is generally adequate, and in some cases may be preferred, e.g., people are more willing to give negative responses to an automated system than to a human agent. An automated system has the additonal advantage relative to a human agent of eliminating a subsequent data entry step.
In one known service offering, customers call a special phone number and respond to pre-recorded questions using a telephone keypad. Limitations of this service offering include lack of universal availability of dual tone multi-frequency telephones (rotary telephones provide out-of-voiceband signals, and so are unsuitable for data entry) and an awkward interface due to availability of only twelve keys. Also, some users are uncomfortable with providing information by "typing".